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Sorry kids, but after another couple of weeks of silence round these parts, I feel compelled to write yet another entry apologising for not writing any entries recently. I’m not sure why, actually. It’s not as if I haven’t had anything to write about, but I just don’t seem to find the time these days. Anywhere, rather than pontificate on where my life has disappeared to, here are some of the things I might have written about, if I could have been bothered.

– Lisbon: Oh, yes, we went to Lisbon a couple of weeks ago for a weekend of general drunkenness, courtesy of my new employer, and it was great. We were driven to the hotel by Lisbon’s craziest taxi driver, who managed to beat the other taxi that set off at the same time by a good five minutes (and subtly rip us off in the process–for future reference, if the driver covers the meter with a duster when you get into the cab, then he’s probably going to charge you at least twice the going rate). Following on from this great start, we completed five bloggable activities before lunchtime, which included checking into the hotel and having the concierge nod at Sally, wink at me, and say “your room, Sir, with a king size bed“. Oh, and on the Tap Air Portugal Flights they show a film about babies learning to swin. Altogether: Aaaaah.

– New Year: Doing anything for new year’s eve this year? We’re off to Estonia. Why not join us?

– Turning 27: The pain of becoming another year older (I had to change the sidebar and everything) was numbed somewhat by the impressive turnout at my birthday celebrations last Friday night (not to mention the impressive quantities of Stella pushed in my direction). Thanks for coming, everyone, and I’m sorry if I was drunk.

– Car Crash TV: Finding myself watching a lot of car crash TV recently–reality shows like How Not To Be A Property Developer (or Sarah Beeney shows how she was Right All Along) in which a young couple try to make a quick buck renovating some rundown terrace somewhere, completely misunderstand their target market, blow 30 grand on a pink kitchen and end up taking a substantial loss. Where do they get these idiots? (and why do I continue to watch?)

– (In)NaNoWriMo: Yes, I know I said I’d do this last year, and never got anywhere, but I think I actually might give it a proper stab this time. Ever since reading an article in The Guardian a couple of months ago, I’ve had an idea brewing in my head, and I think it might actually work. It’s a novel about Art, Deception, Fraud, and Home Shopping. We’ll see how it goes…

– Everton: Still Third. What’s Going On?

Earlier this week, I finally joined the 21st Century by upgrading my mobile phone from that Nokia that everyone had in about 1999, to that Nokia that everyone had about 6 months ago, with the camera, colour screen, java games and polyphonic ringtones. Not, you understand, because I actually need any of that stuff–my requirements in a phone don’t extend much beyond being able to make phone calls, and send text messages–but more because my phone requirements also include having buttons that work, and being able to plug the charger in. Apparently dropping your phone on the floor at semi-regular intervals over a 3 year period doesn’t actually do it any good after all.

It took a while to get used to the fact that they’ve gone and moved all the buttons around, and even added extra ones (not the number buttons obviously, that would be silly–I’m not implying that Nokia have invented some new numbers or anything), but I worked it out eventually. It was slightly more of a challenge getting my phone to use a ringtone that wasn’t utterly awful.

The preset tones that Nokia chose to include with the phone were all appalling. They didn’t even bother to include anything that just sounds like a phone ringing, so for the first couple of days I was forced to use the least worst option–the dreaded Nokia Tune in all its polyphonic glory. I didn’t think it was possible, but somehow the engineering geniuses at Nokia have managed to make Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy ringtone sound even worse by rendering it using four simultaneous notes. It’s just as well nobody ever calls me anyway.

Resolving to do something about this, I went on the Internet looking for something better. Now there’s no way I’m giving my credit card details or phone number to some shabby website in return for some awful ringtone, so instead I downloaded some Nokia software for converting audio and transferring files to and from the phone. Unfortunately, this lead to me spending a pleasant evening tearing my hair out trying to make my phone’s infrared port talk to my laptop, and becomming increasingly frustrated with the inadequate information in the user manual. (Note to Nokia Technical Writers: Look, if the only way to make the infrared work is to change the baud rate on your PC to less than 112,500bps, don’t you think it might be a good idea to say so somewhere in the manual? Am I supposed to work it out for myself? Gah!) At one point, Sal and I resorted to waving the phone around in front of the computer in the vain hope of establishing a connection.

Then when I finally got it working, it merrily started deleting my old text messages and stored phone numbers, as it tried to synchronise itself with some copy it thought it had made on my PC, but I got most of them back in the end, somehow.

[I ended up using Street Spirit, (found via this collection of MIDI sounds). It’s no Itchy and Scratchy, but it’ll do…]

I’m sure by now you’ve all seen the excellent Super Size Me, the entertaining documentary in which New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock demonstrates that eating exclusively at McDonald’s for a month will, gasp, make you fat.

Sal and I caught it a couple of weeks ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Of course it’s a one-sided polemic, but it’s a very funny one-sided polemic, and, unlike watching, say, a Michael Moore documentary, you don’t spend most of the film wanting to slap the documentary maker for his self-righteous hypocrisy.

When we left the cinema, I vowed to change my habits, and we immediately popped over the road to the supermarket to stock up on fruit and veg (although the new extra-healthy regime lasted about 2 days, before I went back to exactly the same habits as before).

Anyway, the reason that I mention this now, is to draw your attention to the hilarious response from McDonald’s: Super Size Me: The Debate.

It is of course not a debate at all, just some PR in the form of a flash animation that tries to explain why McDonald’s isn’t all that bad. I particularly love the “True or False” section, which contains true or false “questions” like the following [emphasis mine] that have been carefully worded to enable the website to answer false every time:

– “McDonald’s never display any nutritional information anywhere in their restaurants”
– “All McDonald’s salads contain more calories than a Big Mac”
– “McNuggets are made from every part of the chicken…”

Truly excellent: it’s rather like a politican dodging an awkward question (Interviewer: “George Bush: Have you ever taken cocaine?” George Bush: “I didn’t take cocaine in the 1980s…”), but they’ve saved the best for last:

– “That film Super Size Me has really got McDonald’s on the run”

No, of course not–just scared enough to create a flashy website and spend a whole pile of cash on careful PR to refute its clearly baseless claims that eating bad food isn’t good for you.

Someone must have been paying attention lately, because shortly after writing the entry below apologising for my lack of updates, I was rewarded with not one, but two encounters with blog-worthy nutters. The first was the elderly lady sitting opposite Sal and myself on the tube on Saturday afternoon. At her feet, she had three or four plastic carrier bags containing copies of tabloid newspapers, which she proceeded to tear into small pieces and throw onto the floor of the train, as if the shredded remains of the Daily Mirror’s sports section would make a lovely carpet for us weary tube travellers. It did seem as if she was actually reading the paper before tearing it, though, and as she passed each word she would tear it off and throw it on the floor. Perhaps I should adopt this technique to stop Sal from nicking the magazine section the next time I sit down with Saturday’s Indie.

Our second nutter arrived much later, towards the end of our afternoon’s farewell drinking in Notting Hill. He was a greying middle aged American chap holding a stack of large printed sheets of his poetry, which detailed his views on everything from AIDS to love, marriage and the Jon-Benet Ramsey case. I could not quite work out if he was trying to sell his poetry, or just preaching, but he engaged us in one of the most baffling, incoherent conversations I’ve ever encountered. I couldn’t honestly tell you what he was actually trying to say at any given point–he jumped from subject to subject, talking in alternate sentences about copyright (“have you heard about the U2 case?”), Cat Stevens being refused entry to the US, and the absence of piano bars in the UK. Whatever my repeated affirmative responses everytime he asked “you know what I’m saying”? might have suggested, I actually had no idea. When we left he was standing outside the pub deep in conversation with the bouncers, passing poem after poem to them.

Top marks, today, to the brilliant minds at Metronet, Tfl and WAGN trains, who have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that for the next year or so while the escalators at Moorgate are being replaced, WAGN trains will not be stopping there, but will instead terminate at Old Street, the stop before.

Until today, my daily change of trains from WAGN to the Northern line at Moorgate has been about as easy as changing trains in London ever gets–the WAGN and Northern line platforms at Moorgate are close to each other, and, crucially, (and this is the key fact that the new plan seems to have overlooked) lots of people get off the Northern line at Moorgate. This meant that it was always quite easy for myself and all the other people switching from WAGN to get on the Northern line train. More often than not, I even got a seat.

If today’s experience is anything to go by, the effect of the change is that all the people travelling to Moorgate (who were supposed to be walking or catching a bus from Old Street) are now changing onto the Northern line at Old Street instead and getting off at Moorgate anyway.

So, in fact, not only has this new plan failed to solve one problem (reducing the number of people at Moorgate during the rush hour), it has actually created a second (where there used to be both a tube and a train carrying passengers into Moorgate, there is now only a very packed tube).

Genius! So now every morning I get to wedge myself between the door space of the Northern line and a grey-suited businessman’s armpits for one stop before the train virtually empties and I get to sit down.

I guess I should apologise, on the off chance that there’s anyone actually out there still reading this, for my lack of updates (aside from the occasional celebrity spotting haiku) over the past month.

It’s not like I’ve been short of things to write about, (although a funny incident on the tube or at a gig slightly pales into insignificance against the sort of things that Rob has been recounting in his fascinating updates from his travels in Asia). Not writing so much at my new work is probably the main factor. It’s not, you understand, because I can’t (although it’s probably not good to look too much like a web-surfing, blogging, work-shy skiver in your first month), but because I’ve been deeply engrossed in hatching my master plans for sorting out their documentation (now that I’ve been given the freedom to do whatever I like).

We have been getting out and about, though. Last week we went to the Shepherd’s Bush Empire to catch Pete Murray, another Aussie bloke with a guitar failing to break the UK (“are there any Australians in tonight…?”) It was a moderately entertaining gig, despite the fact that a lot of his songs sound the same, and I consequently spent much of the gig convinced that, as he only has the one album, each song he started was one he had already played (although in the case of his encore, I’m pretty sure he did actually play a song for the second time). He was supported by a young Irish chap by the name of Paddy Casey, who, proving that the old jokes are the best, ended his spot with the old Norman Prince classic: “if you’ve enjoyed it, my name’s Paddy Casey, and I’ve an album out called Livin’; if you haven’t, my name’s Damien Rice and I’ve an album out named O“.

We spent Wednesday evening out at the club formerly known as Camden’s shabby Camden Palace, but now reborn as the refurbished (well, painted red all over at least) KoKo. It was ostensibly an NME-themed club night, but that seemed to mean them playing a load of music I didn’t recognise (apart from the occasional Libertines), and showcasing a band called The Kaiser Chiefs, who were, well, alright, I guess. Maybe I’m getting old. Still, perhaps it’s worth going there just to see the largest mirror ball ever, as long as you can get in for free, like we did.

And today will mostly be spent in the pub commiserating a departing Aussie with an expired Working Holiday Visa, oh, and bragging about this. (Ahem, and this).

It’s hard work being us.

In the row in front,
At the Richard Herring show,
Emma Kennedy

I’m not sure if that really counts, but as I never see celebrities around town, I have to make the most of everything I can get: On Saturday, Sal and I popped into the West End to see the finished version of the Richard Herring show that we had seen previewed back in July. Despite my impression that we might turn out to be the only people there (on Thursday afternoon, when I booked the tickets, the Ticketmaster website was happy to offer me most of the seats in the front row, and the second, and the one behind that, and…) the bottom section of the theatre was almost full (although our suspicion that the circle might not have had any people in it was later confirmed by Herring’s report on his blog). The finished version of the show was largely excellent, and although there were a few jokes I recognised from the first time, there was also a lot of additional material, and in general the whole thing worked much better as a show. And he didn’t have to read his script off some sheets of printed A4 this time, which is always a good thing.

Bloke off Grand Designs
by the Thames at Tower Bridge,
filming some new show.

UPDATE: Gutted. So excited to have finally spotted a celebrity around town, and now I discover, thanks to PopBitch’s Hasselwatch that none other than Mr Michael Knight himself has been to London’s The London Dungeon recently, just a short walk from my new office. Must get out a lunchtime a bit more often.

This weekend’s gloriously sunny Saturday saw me pay my first ever visit to Lord’s. The occasion was a pre-ICC tournament warm-up between Australia and Pakistan, and despite the exorbitant ticket prices (especially considering it was only a friendly), almost every Australian I’d ever met in London was there too, along with many more I hadn’t met besides (if you’d wanted to pick a good day to start burgling houses in the Shepherd’s Bush, Acton and Fulham areas of London, Saturday would surely have been it). Not only was this my first visit to Lord’s, but actually the first time I’d been to see a live professional cricket match. I had often wondered how anyone could sit around all day watching a game in which so little happens, but it turns out that most people get around this small flaw by spending 90% of the proceedings drinking, chatting, eating, and only actually concentrating on events on the field when called upon to shout, cheer, and wave a large advert for NatWest with a big number 4 written on it (or the advert for mortgages on the other side, depending on how drunk you are by this point).

We arrived back in Split at about 5pm, and headed away from all the SobeRoomSleeping? people waving their pieces of paper at us at the station (with me replying NoFerrySleepingHome each time) and straight over to the ferry ticket desk to see if we could somehow obtain a proper bed for the night. Despite having twice failed to book a cabin for the return journey prior to this, we were now told that there was indeed one available, but in some bizarre Kafka-esque ritual that I to this day still don’t quite understand, we couldn’t pay the extra money for it at the ticket desk, but only on the boat, and not in the currency of the country we were in, but only in Euros (and obtaining them proved to be comically difficult, considering the fact that at least one of the three exchange offices “didn’t exchange euros”–so what currencies do you exchange, exactly?) When we got onto the boat, and the Italian staff took Sally’s passport from us and told us we couldn’t pay for our cabin until after the boat had left port, I stopped even trying to work out why things were happening. But we got our cabin in the end, and slept blissfully all the way back to Italy.

As the flight home wasn’t until the evening, we planned to kill a few hours in Bologna on the way back to Venice, but it was mostly shut and full of awfully pricey bars charging extortionate cover charges (I can only wonder how much the two chubby Italian chaps at the table next to us who were drinking champagne and eating sandwiches at 11am were paying for the privilege, considering the price we paid for our two ice coffees). Sally was happy enough when the shops (almost entirely women’s clothes shops) opened in the afternoon, but I’m not sure I’d have bothered going to Bologna if I’d know what wasn’t there.

Later, much later, when we got back to Gatwick, I had the pleasure of my scruffy rucksack being the very first bag off. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, and I’m sure it never will again.